Please note if you live in Central North Carolina: One of the guilds I belong to is having a quilt show soon! One of my other quilt groups makes quilts for Flying Horse Farm, a camp for children with serious illnesses. Here are my contributions for this spring. This quilt was inspired by Maryline Collioud-Robert’s Carnival Quilt, in which she mixed many striped fabrics with her scraps. I didn’t use her pattern, just her idea of including lots of striped fabric. However, here’s the link to her pattern if you’re interested. Quilt Stats Name: Strips with Stripes Finished size: 60″ x 72″ Designed ..read more

A friend and I went to a new class last week to learn to make little pincushions. Of course, I’ve made pincushions before, as I think most quilters have, We went to the class because we are interested in having the presenter come to our guild. This is the pincushion I made in class The class was held at Sew Much Fun in Lowell, near Charlotte, NC. My friend had told me it was a wonderful shop, and indeed it was. Lesley Storts was the teacher. I’ve known of her for some time, but she used to be in Ohio and I only recently learned she had moved to North Carolina. Lesley Storts It looks like L ..read more

I saw a version of this quilt in a show a while back and liked it, so when I learned it was a Zen Chic design I bought the pattern. And to be honest, it’s been finished for a while; I’m behind on binding again! The blue and white main fabrics came from an informal shop hop in Amish country, Ohio, a year ago. I’ve been looking for he perfect pattern for using them! The pattern was well written and I enjoyed making it. And just FYI, it’s not paper pieced. It’s available here. Quilt Stats Name: Contrasting Finished size: 56″ x 55″ Designer: Brigitte Heitland Maker: me Quilter: Lewis Schafer   ..read more

Last week I went with friends to spend a few days in Northern Virginia. We rented a little house with a living room/dining room combo large enough for us all to set up and do some quilting, we went to a local quilt show, and we tried to visit some quilt shops. Here are some of my favorite quilts from the Northern Shenandoah Valley Quilt Show, presented by multiple guilds from the area. The theme of the show was “My Favorite Color is Plaid”. Members of the local Modern  Guild challenged themselves to make small modern quilts using fabric from plaid shirts. “Curved Plaids” by Heidi Haynes ..read more

One of my guilds provides little wall quilts, featuring houses, to Habitat for Humanity. They give one of these quilts to each new homeowner, and have asked us to provide a few more. To make this one, I used a pre-drawn block from EQ8 and printed a line drawing of it at 12″ x 12″. Then all I had to do was measure the components and make the fusible applique quilt. This is the block as it was shown in EQ8: Block design taken directly from EQ8 And here is the line drawing I printed from the program (along with my notes!): EQ8 drew this as if I were going to piece it. There was the option to p ..read more

Last year’s Block of the Month (BOM) at Studio Stitch was a series of complex hexagons made with the Jaybird Quilts rulers. You can read about the woman who designed this way to make them in my earlier post here. I enjoyed making the blocks and most weren’t very difficult with the use of the rulers and Justiann’s good instructions. They looked great when I put a few up on the design wall to view them together. It was my intention to make the quilt using the Kaufman Effervescence fabric, like Holly did here: Quilt (c) Holly Alloway, designed and made by her The fabric was ordered by the shop ..read more

A friend called recently to say that a local charity wanted a quilt to decorate their new office space. I sent a couple of pictures and they were enthusiastic but thought maybe they wanted both quilts! Eventually someone came over to look at some options since both the pictures I sent were very much alike; I didn’t think they’d want two quilt so similar. Of course I was thrilled that somebody wanted my quilts! The charity is Backpack Beginnings, a local organization whose mission is to give “food and basic necessities directly to children in need” and to connect their families to appropriate c ..read more

This pattern came from a shop I visited on vacation last year. Then there was the issue of templates, which I ended up ordering from the same shop where I’d bought the pattern. Of course I can make templates, but it’s so much easier to cut around an acrylic template than to draw around a home-made template and then cut with scissors. I got the small templates because that’s all that was available. Here’s a detailed picture in which you can see the lovely swirl quilting as well as that pointed lozenge that finishes at 2-1/4 inches long! The quilt was exhausting to make, but I love it now that i ..read more

It probably looks like I’ve been wandering around the country taking classes instead of making quilts, and of course that’s partly true. However, here are a couple of finishes. This first one was made because I love-love-love some of the Tim Holtz fabrics, so the blue-green one is featured here. Also, I really like the movement triangles give to a quilt top, so I chose this Jaybird Quilts pattern called ChopSticks. A few of the blocks are made with some Fossil Fern fabric I found; I thought I had given it all away, but I guess not! Anyway it fit right in and provided a bit of variety. Qui ..read more

I’m happy to say I was able to attend the Mid-Atlantic Quilt Festival (MAQF) in Virginia recently. I took two classes and will write more about them later. For now, here are some of the quilts I especially enjoyed. There were many traditional quilts and art quilts, but of course my favorites were mostly modern. And BTW, I’m sure some of them came directly from QuiltCon. Simply Luxury by Susan Bravereman Holding Space by Sharon M Carrier Modern Garden by Andrea Barrett Orange Sherbet, by Sana R. Moulder, was made from a pattern. I would have liked to know the name of the pattern! And lo ..read more